


Neville's Truth

by Sunruner



Series: Sunny's Commissions! [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gap-Filler, Gen, actually on FFN not AO3, commission, it's 173 chapters on FFN and tumblr watch out, snakeskins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 09:59:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12528792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunruner/pseuds/Sunruner
Summary: Commissioned gap-filler for Snakeskins. Neville Longbottom finally learns the truth of the Bureau of International Muggle Relations.





	Neville's Truth

**Author's Note:**

> This was a $6 Commission paid for via my Ko-fi account! The full story is available on my Tumblr (LSunnyC), and my FFN (Sunruner), and is a discontinued work called "Snakeskins"

When Neville Longbottom wakes up in St. Mungo’s Hospital, he’s bleary-eyed and nowhere near certain what’s happened to him. His wife is there and she brushes her hand so gently through his hair, and a medi-wizard comes in quietly with Harry. Neville’s heart feels tattered and deflated.

He hears the word possession and nods off again after a draught of something that tastes like sweet lemon drops.

The next time Neville wakes up, there are crystals and bundles of herbs strewn around his bed, several of which are on floating. There are two people standing over his bedside looking down at him, Bill Weasley and… oh, he’s unexpected…

It’s… the asshole Italian. The rude one. The abusive, absent son of a bitch who sends terrible howlers to his little brother…

Neville feels his worn-out heart suddenly lighten by a few ounces, he takes a breath that doesn’t hurt. He can hold that thought in young Vargas’ defense without feeling the poison of but he’s Slytherin sink through him.

Bill asks him how he is, and Neville can barely speak. Better: he feels so much better.

“Not possessed of some manic need to murder me?” The Italian asshole questions, and Neville scowls at him as best he can but… really, he doesn’t feel the heat anymore. He doesn’t feel that anger that was maybe never his anger at all. He shakes his head. “Good! I would invite my counterpart in here to gloat over running you through with Gryffindor’s Sword, but I don’t think Kirkland is done with him yet.”

Kirkland. Another name he used to hate and hate so much, so indescribably and with more violence than Neville now, sober and lucid, can stand. Another boy with a horrible family of horrible men surrounding and smothering him.

But Vargas mentioned Gryffindor’s Sword and suddenly Neville remembers: he remembers the library and Professor Erikson, who he has hated, who he has wanted away and out of Hogwarts for so long, even though now as he lays here in this bed, Neville cannot fathom why.

He started a bar-fight with Erikson. Why? He was disappointed when the man came back ill-recovered from the armour attack on the school. Why?

What’s been happening to him?

“You were possessed, Neville.” Bill tells him in the kindest way, and it’s horrible to hear. “The Revenant of Angelique Rosetti. She tethered herself to you for reasons we’re still not sure of. Your duel with Professor Erikson-”

“Former Professor,” Vargas interrupts, like the rude git he still is. But Neville feels a tremble. Why former?

“-thank you,” Bill says in a very not-thankful voice. “When Erikson struck you with the sword, it triggered the release of the Revenant. It almost killed him when it ran through him but he managed to slow the bloodloss until the Aurors arrived.” Bill takes a breath here, and he holds it, the scars across his face looking stark against his skin. “…He never intended to kill you, Neville.” He looks aside at Vargas’ shoes. “…Kirkland is being too harsh with him.”

“Norway used lethal force against a British citizen,” Vargas shrugs off the cryptic words. “He has every right to enforce the treaty and punish the nation who broke it. For myself? I’m just glad this whole fucking circus is finally over with.”

“But you could make peace between them!” Bill blurts out, and the warlock next to him gives a quiet huff. “You’re as much a part of the treaty as Kirkland! I can see it around you!”  
Vargas has been standing there in a long black cloak with it closed around his front, but Bill reaches at him now and grabs the Warlock’s wrist, hoisting his hand up. Neville tries to sit up at the sight of glowing golden threads faintly, oh so delicately, wrapped around the man’s wrist and fingers, tied off around the knuckles.

Vargas scowls back at Bill and coils his fingers a few times, then pulls out of the grip. He looks at his hand and continues to flex it, then frowns at Bill and Neville.

“There’s nothing to see?” He says, but he isn’t so sure. He gestures with his hand at Neville. “Do you see anything?”

Yes, and he croaks out the colour: “Gold.” This doesn’t please Vargas, who looks at his hand again and then huffs.

“Wizards. Fine, yes, I could get between them, but the simple fact is that I won’t. If Italian and British forces had collided, I would be involved: but men kill men, soldiers kill soldiers, and soldiers kill civilians, but nations do not kill civilians, not without repercussions.”

“He’s not dead!” Bill argues, gesturing at Neville. “And Neville attacked him! He was possessed! It was a horrible thing and everyone suffered for it- you need to tell Kirkland to back off!”

“No?” Vargas complains, like it’s obvious when really the man is talking in code. “I literally just said there are repercussions for these sorts of things. I have no dog in this race. Let England stop his brother, or Feliciano when he recovers from this, but me? Hell no. Norway is legally culpable for what happened, if he didn’t want to be restricted he shouldn’t have signed a treaty whose opening clause was the protection and safeguarding of students and staff. He stabbed a fucking teacher, Weasley, and now we have the Revenant contained: Italy is out.”

Vargas almost leaves after that, but Bill convinces him to stay. Neville needs things explained to him- and slowly…

“Neville… it’s all coming out now, so I can finally say this without setting off the charm, but: the Kirklands and the Vargases… they’re immortal.”

It’s all too much to try and comprehend. There are no horcruxes. They are not wizards or mages or people in any real sense. They live and they die on the identity of their people, brought forth like foam on the rolling seas, human lives collected like grains of sand on a beach. 

They are not gods because they don’t control anything beyond their own limited circles and spheres of influence, but they are not men because their death requires the abolishment of a way of life, a way of thinking, a language of hearts and minds. 

International Muggle Relations isn’t an oligarchy of gate-keepers and suffocating family cults. The department is simply a front for the same few hundred people who have lived and died and existed amongst only each other since government itself first took shape.

And two of those not quite god men came to Hogwarts as children. One came to avenge and discover the reason why two of his children had died there. The other came to protect and defend the school Britain has prized for generations. 

Neville has spent the last five years hating both of them…

Vargas isn’t- South Italy isn’t very patient about all of this. Bill keeps trying to angle the conversation back to Erikso- The Kingdom of Norway? And his plight- with- Scotland!?

“I will not stop Scotland!” Vargas raises his voice this time. “If someone tried to kill your son- just shut up and listen to me! If someone tried to kill your son, actually tried to kill him, and wounded him and left him dying in a pool of his own lifeblood- If some son of a bitch did that to your son, then it would not even cross your mind to consider their intentions or what actions they took to save them after the fact! Norway tried to kill a British fucking citizen when he was treaty-bound to safeguard every last person at Hogwarts! Scotland is out for blood because Norway spilled it first!”

It was self-defense. Neville says as much; his voice cracks, but he says it, and Vargas rounds on him harshly.

“Immortal!” He shouts, and then with a step back from both of them, he seethes: “Not-killable! Not by you! Not by a fucking sword, or an explosion, or even the killing curse itself! Im-mor-tal. The only thing in Hogwarts that comes close to being a real threat is that fucking Revenant, and who is holding onto that? My brother.” And then something… very powerful… begins to tug and pull through his angry, growling voice. 

“This investigation is over.” He hisses, gesturing slowly and deliberately with his hands. “This infiltration? Over. This circus of charms and ages and families is fucking over. I am done. I am taking my brother’s body home and there we will untangle the mess that Hogwarts made of that poor child’s afterlife. What Feliciano does after he wakes up? It’s none of my business. What tale Arthur chooses to spin to explain his own disappearance to the children they have been protecting all these years? None of my fucking business.”

Neville is shaken, he’s broken hearted all over again. He thinks of his letters with Percy, the vitriolic hatred they fed each other for years over the Vargases and the Kirklands. He thinks of Harry, who owes James’ life to Erikson, the same not-quite-god-man who saved Scorpius Malfoy’s academic career, and how according to Bill: in another room here in this very hospital, the Kingdom of Norway is being brow-beaten and dismissed by his British allies. He’s been told to leave the country on a short deadline: only a few hours, on pain of having Muggle authorities somehow involved to complicate and humiliate him.

Neville is shaken, and he’s tired, and he’s to blame for so much of this. He hasn’t even reached the bottom of the pit yet, nevermind begun to pull himself out of it. 

The last words spoken to him by Lovino Vargas, the not-quite-god of Southern Italy, are:

“The treaty is broken, the Revanent is captured, and this is over.”


End file.
